New Report: NCIS Hid Medical Evidence About Guantanamo Suicides

The Senior Medical Officer (SMO) at Guantanamo who attended at least two of three high-profile "suicides" at Guantanamo nearly eight years ago concluded at the time that, contrary to the conclusions of a later government investigation, the detainees did not die by hanging but by "likely asphyxiation" from "obstruction" of the airway. Moreover this SMO found a prisoner he examined and pronounced dead had "cotton clothing material in [his] mouth and upper pharynx." (See pgs. 5-7 of this PDF to view the SMO's original findings.)

The finding is consistent with other accounts, and with the theory the three prisoners died from a torture procedure known as "dryboarding," as researcher Almerindo Ojeda described in an 2011 story at Truthout.

Yet, unaccountably, the SMO was never formally interviewed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which had the Department of Defense mandate to investigate the supposed suicides. Furthermore, the SMO's account was not included in the NCIS final report. This new finding is one of a number of such discoveries detailed in a new investigatory report published last month by The Center for Policy and Research (CPR) at Seton Hall University School of Law.

Thus far, their report has been totally ignored by the press.

Other findings in CPR's new report either ignored or overlooked in previous investigations include the fact that guards who searched the deceased's rooms only hours prior to their deaths did "not discover anything that a detainee could hang himself with.... in the manner of the rumors" of their death by hanging.

CPR's report, "Uncovering the Cover-ups: Death in Camp Delta," was supervised by Seton Hall law professor (and attorney for some Guantanamo detainees) Mark Denbeaux, and co-written by Charles Church, Ryan K. Gallagher, Adam Kirchner and Joshua Wirtshafter. Joseph Hickman, who was at Guantanamo at the time of the deaths, and who figured so prominently in Scott Horton’s January 2010 Harper’s article, “The Guantanamo Suicides," acted as lead investigator. A full PDF download of the paper is available at this link.

This article will summarize CPR's findings, but it is highly recommended that readers study the entire report.

Newly Uncovered Documents

Last month, Scott Horton wrote an article at Harpers Magazine, "The Guantanamo 'Suicides," Revisited," which reproduced and annotated a document that had been suppressed in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) release of documents concerning their investigation into three purported suicides at Guantanamo on June 10, 2006. The document, part of a group of documents associated with a separate Staff Judge Advocate investigation of the deaths, had sat unexamined on a DoD FOIA website for literally years, until both Seton Hall and Scott Horton brought it to the public's attention. The original can be found on pgs. 15-17 of this PDF.

The explosive document -- a sworn statement by Master of Arms Denny called to attend to the suicides that evening -- states a number of facts from a witness on the scene that directly contradicts the story promulgated by Guantanamo officials and the NCIS report into the deaths. (Denny was named by Horton, but not described by name in the CPR report.) Horton and CPR describe Denny's account in some detail, including the fact attempts to revive a still living "suicide" were not made for some time, and that cloth wrapped tightly around his neck was not removed.

Government authorities contend the three prisoners died in an act of simultaneous suicide by hanging, an act JTF Guantanamo Commander Harry Harris described only one day after the deaths as "asymmetrical warfare." It is this version of what happened that has been accepted by a wide section of the press. Horton's article surmises that the prisoners may have died at Guantanamo's "Camp No," also known as "Penny Lane," thought to be a special CIA black site at Guantanamo used to coerce prisoners, including through torture, to turn informants for the U.S. government.

CPR's report goes much farther than Horton's article in documenting exactly how the government pulled this document -- Exhibit 25 of the NCIS report -- and replaced it with random pages from elsewhere in the group of documents gathered in the course of the investigation. Detailed in Appendix D of the report, the work is an impressive piece of forensic research.

This deliberate suppression of information contrary to the government's story should be a matter of public outrage and congressional investigation, but the CPR report also shows how the Obama administration's Justice Department deliberately misled congressional queries about the report in the wake of the 2010 Harpers report and earlier Seton Hall CPR investigation and report, "Death in Camp Delta" (PDF).

Unfortunately, for reasons that are not clear at present, Horton's recent article, which drew upon work done by Seton Hall's (CPR), did not include reference to to a number of other new findings and documents CPR uncovered in their ongoing analysis of the Guantanamo deaths (including the SMO report). The documents describe how important evidence contradicting the official narrative were withheld from the NCIS report. Furthermore, when congressional representatives went to the Department of Justice to ask for an investigation, they were lied to about how long the investigation had taken, and whether or not there was evidence that showed something other than death by hanging.

According to the CPR Executive Summary, besides the findings discussed above, the new report concludes:

• Contrary to standard investigative protocol, NCIS never authenticated “suspected suicide notes.”

• Contrary to standard suspected suicide protocol, NCIS never investigated the behavior, state of mind, or emotional condition of the dead men during the minutes, hours, days, and weeks before they died.

• NCIS failed to investigate multiple irregularities in protocol, among them: tampering with the contents of cells where the men were reported to have died, as well as more than fifty discrete events so irregular that they had no specific designation in the log book, and that were so secret that their details were redacted which occurred for hours before the alleged crime scene was secured and investigated by NCIS....

• Contrary to extensive protocol, the Camp Commander ordered the cessation of video recording of the events.

Cover-up or "Conspiracy building"?

The most compelling evidence of a cover-up consists of contemporaneous reports that all three prisoners were found with socks or other cloth material shoved deep into their throats. It was this account of the deaths that Guantanamo authorities moved quickly to cover-up and replace with a story that the detainees had hanged themselves.

According to Horton's 2010 article, the Joint Detention Group Commander, Michael Bumgarner, gathered camp personnel hours after the deaths and told them "you all know" the prisoners had died from swallowing rags and choking to death, but the press would be told something different: the prisoners had died by hanging themselves.

In May 2011, Alex Koppelman, then writing for Adweek, but currently the News Editor for The Guardian/US, wrote an influential article criticizing Scott Horton for "conspiracy building." He decried the story about Baumgarner's speech about "rags" -- because Bumgarner denied to him having ever made it. Koppelman's account was later cited in a government legal brief used to counter a lawsuit by the relatives of two of the Guantanamo "suicides." I deconstructed Koppelman's account in a series of articles that examined his arguments in detail.

But the new evidence in Horton's article and the Seton Hall report demonstrates conclusively that multiple witnesses on the scene, including the Senior Medical Officer, found cloth material inside the deceased's mouths and throats. This was no "conspiracy building": the evidence was covered up.

Among many telling details in the new documents, Master of Arms Denny's account of how one detainee, ISN 093, Yasser Talal al Zahrani, was found alive even two hours after he supposedly hanged himself. Denny witnessed cloth matching a ligature placed around Zahrain's throat being wrapped around his hands:

I observed a Corpsman wrapping an altered detainee sheet... around the detainee’s right wrist. The other side of the material was bound to the detainee’s left wrist with approximately a foot of cloth in between. The cloth was not on the detainees [sic] wrists when the Camp 1 guards removed the handcuffs a few minutes earlier.

The fact all the "suicides" had their hands bound was supposed to be evidence of collaboration in the "asymmetrical warfare" that was simultaneous suicide. But Denny's account shows the "evidence" was being fabricated after the supposed suicides themselves.

The Seton Hall report deserves wide exposure and Congress must undertake its own investigation, as it's evident that DOJ and the Obama administration have no intention of looking further into what happened. But according to Seton Hall's Executive Director for Communications, Janet LeMonnier, attempts to get attention from multiple attempts at media outreach have garnered "very little interest," and CPR personnel are frustrated at the lack of response.

Even so, Mark Denbeaux told me in a phone interview that Seton Hall's investigations are going forward, and another report with even more new revelations is due out early next year.

Cross-posted from FDL/The Dissenter

Why the Huffington Post Needs to Immediately Retract Mark Benjamin's Afghanistan Massacre Report

Originally published at Truthout
This article reflects an updates included in the original Truthout article

A March 25 article by Mark Benjamin at The Huffington Post seriously misled readers about a link between the controversial antimalarial drug mefloquine and the mass murder in Afghanistan attributed to Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. Relying on a document he wrongly identified, and with zero evidence backing up his claims, Benjamin's headline stated "Military Scrambles to Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghan Massacre." As a matter of journalistic ethics, Benjamin should apologize to his readers and retract the story.

The article begins with a dishonestly crafted lede that links the Afghan massacre with a "task order" memo from a Department of Defense (DoD) command regarding a review of mefloquine procedures, and goes on to suggest that Sgt. Robert Bales, a victim of traumatic brain injury, may have gone psychotic from use of mefloquine and possibly committed the killings under influence of the drug. Furthermore, the article strongly implied that DoD possibly knew this and then implemented an "emergency review" of mefloquine procedures nine days after the Afghan killings.

UPDATE: Instead of issuing the retraction I called for, Mark Benjamin, in yet another deceptive move aimed at misleading his readers, quietly rewrote his Huffington Post story hours after this report was published Wednesday morning without informing those readers that he made substantial changes to his original report. Nor did Benjamin point out to his readers that he quietly rewrote his story and changed the headline nearly four hours after we exposed the errors contained in his original report. Notably, the lede to Benjamin's story, which formed the basis for the entirety of his claims that a Defense Department review revolving around the administration of mefloquine for US troops was ordered after the Afghanistan massacre, no longer makes that argument because, as this report notes, the initial review was ordered before Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly murdered 16 people. Readers who now visit the Huffington Post link where Benjamin's story was originally published will be find a very different story. But this is how his report originally appeared when it was published Monday. I encourage you to compare the two. My report was published, as the time stamp below my byline shows, at 10:44 am. The rewrite to Benjamin's story was posted at 2:35 pm.

But nothing in the record suggests this is true. The word "emergency" is never used [UPDATE: Benjamin changed "emergency" in his original report to "urgent" after I pointed out the word was never used.] in the one document Benjamin cites, and an actual examination of the full documentary record shows that the mefloquine review described in the article was actually ordered last January.

Despite these serious flaws, Benjamin's article caused a sensation in the press, being picked up by many news outlets, including interviews with Benjamin on the topic at both CNN and Democracy Now!.

But in an email to Truthout, a DoD official strongly refuted Benjamin's claims, explaining that the task order referenced by the Huffington Post author originated in a January 17, 2012, memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. Jonathan Woodson. Despite Benjamin's reporting, the review order was not issued nine days after the Afghanistan murders, nor was it limited to Afghanistan, but involved five different regional commands.

The official explained that the delay in implementing the review in the Afghan theatre was due to the absence of a key individual. The urgency in the March 20 task order (sometimes called a "tasker") referenced by Benjamin was due to a deadline for the conclusion of the review set back in January.
The official told Truthout:

Army Medical Command did receive the ASD [Assistant Secretary of Defense] Health Affairs tasking memo in mid-January, but due to the absence of the tasking individual on a temporary duty assignment for several weeks, the request to review the Army's program was not staffed and pushed out to the five regional medical commands until March 5th with a suspense date of March 15th. The Regions expressed that this was not enough time so they were given until March 20th to reply. This still put us well within the 90-day window provided by the original tasker in January. This review has no relation whatsoever to the incident in Afghanistan, as borne out by the dates when the tasker was initiated by ASD-Health Affairs in mid-January and later by the Army Medical Command to its subordinate regions on March 5th.

The official noted other problems with the Benjamin story. The link to what Benjamin called the "task order from Woodson, obtained by the Huffington Post," was actually to "a tasking document from one of the Army Medical Command regions - specifically the Southern Regional Medical Command, annotated in the incorrectly identified memo as 'SRMC'."

It appears Benjamin relied upon an implementing order by a lower command, but even with an update to his story a day later, the Huffington Post journalist insisted on linking this document to the Afghanistan killings. In his update [UPDATE: the "update" Benjamin posted was changed to a "correction" in the rewritten version of his story], Benjamin incomprehensibly kept pushing the March 20 order, which he claimed "shows that one part of the Army issued a new, urgent call to complete the Jan. 17 request from Woodson within six days." But Benjamin must know this is false, and there was nothing "new" about the order.

Truthout has obtained the original January 17 memo, which can be downloaded here. Woodson expressed concern that, "[s]ome deploying Service members have been provided mefloquine for malaria prophylaxis without appropriate documentation in their medical records and without proper screening for contraindications."

Some five months earlier, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) had issued a press release expressing her concern that mefloquine had been administered to military personnel without the safeguards put in place by a 2009 DoD protocol. Moreover, according to her press release, "These service members are now suffering from ... preventable neurological side effects."

While Benjamin never makes the point directly, if his mefloquine hypothesis about Bales and the killings were true, it would be the first mass murder attributable to mefloquine ever recorded in the roughly four decades of its use.
Yet, Benjamin admitted in his story that there is no evidence Bales ever took mefloquine, noting that DoD will neither confirm nor deny it. Even more, there is no evidence that if he did, he suffered ill effects, much less a reaction that led to the killings of 17 men, women and children on the night of March 13.

Benjamin states that military officials cited "privacy rules" as the reason they could not say whether Bales took mefloquine or not. But Benjamin appears dubious about this, and in his March 26 update to his story, continues to complain, "The Pentagon still will not say if Bales was wrongly given mefloquine."

In fact, the Federal 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, forbids the release of medical information, including by the military, "except for specifically permitted purposes" (see DoD 6025.18-R, paragraph C1.2.1). Such purposes can include criminal investigations, but not releases to the press.

To be fair, Democracy Now! has also emphasized the nondisclosure of Bales' medical information in its story on the possible Bales-mefloquine link, and also never mentions federal law prohibiting such disclosure.

No Mention of Eyewitnesses

Benjamin's article, like a similar piece on Time Magazine's Battleland blog, which Benjamin cites, never mentions that there were eyewitnesses to the Afghan killings who have provided a very different story as to what happened in the March 11 pre-dawn hours of the massacre. The Battleland article was written by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist at Guantanamo.

One eyewitness report in the Global Post quoted Massouma, a woman who lives in the village of Najiban, where 12 people were killed, as saying at the time of the killings that there were helicopters flying overhead. She said the uniformed soldier that entered her home was speaking into a walkie-talkie.
According to the report, the soldier, "had a radio antenna on his shoulder. He had a walkie-talkie himself, and he was speaking into it," Massouma said.

"After the soldier with the walkie-talkie killed her husband, she said he lingered in the doorway of her home," the report continued. "'While he stood there, I secretly looked through the curtains and saw at least 20 Americans, with heavy weapons, searching all the rooms in our compound, as well as my bathroom,' she said."

In another example of eyewitness evidence, Jefferson Morley at Salon pointed out a March 17 Afghanistan Outlook report describing an Afghan Parliamentary investigation, which spent two days "interviewing the bereaved families, tribal elders, survivors and collecting evidences at the site in Panjwai district." The investigation found, "there were 15 to 20 American soldiers, who executed the brutal killings."

The Global Post article also reported that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) turned away reporters who came to interview survivors of the shootings at a hospital at Kandahar Airfield. "'The wounded survivors, who saw everything of the massacre, are crucial to the story,' said one of the frustrated reporters. 'But the Americans didn't allow us to talk to them.'"

While there have been conflicting accounts of the massacre, Benjamin's article followed the DoD claims that Sgt. Bales was the sole soldier involved, then sought reasons to explain the actions of the supposed lone killer. The reader was never informed there may be other evidence that would make the mefloquine narrative superfluous.

Bales was charged with the murders on March 23.

Mefloquine Controversies

Benjamin, with reporter Dan Olmstead, covered the controversy over the use of the antimalarial drug mefloquine in the military. The reporters wrote story after story exposing the slowness, ineptitude and possibly corruption that allowed a dangerous drug to be continuously prescribed to armed forces personnel. So, it may be understandable that Benjamin still harbors passion for the topic. Additionally, Benjamin was correct when he told Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! that the recent DoD review shows that DoD, "seems to be violating its own rules."

Yet, curiously, he has remained silent, including in his most recent article, on investigations that revealed an unprecedented mass dosing of Guantanamo detainees. The supposed presumptive treatment for malaria of all incoming Guantanamo detainees was standard operating procedure, as documents revealed. One medical expert described the use of the drug, which was administered at doses five times that typically administered prophylactically to US soldiers serving in malarial regions, as "pharmacological waterboarding."

[Full disclosure: this author, along with Jason Leopold, conducted these investigations, which were published at Truthout. Seton Hall School of Law's Center for Policy and Research conducted their own investigation and released a report, while the story was later reported as well by the military's own paper, Stars and Stripes.]

Benjamin and "Tall Tale" Journalism 

One of the strangest aspects of Benjamin's article is that it comes not long after Benjamin himself strongly criticized an article by Scott Horton at Harper's Magazine. The article, which won the National Magazine Award for Reporting last year, revealed evidence of a cover-up in the 2006 deaths of three detainees at Guantanamo - deaths the military attributed to suicide.

Benjamin chided Horton for relying on witnesses "who did not witness much," and relying on "alleged inconsistencies and weaknesses in the government's investigation to buttress his narrative that something fishy was going on." He referred readers to another article by his former Salon.com collaborator, Alex Koppelman, who wrote a scathing critique of Horton's article for Adweek. Koppelman called Horton's investigation "a tall tale," and chided Horton for, "less methodical reporting and more conspiracy building, favoring the evidence that supports the conspiracy view and minimizing the evidence that does not."

Koppelman's own criticisms were debunked by this author in an article at Firedoglake last June. But Koppelman's verdict on Horton is an apt judgment upon Benjamin's own recent mefloquine article, which misrepresented government documents, minimized or buried evidence that would refute his claims, and implied a conspiracy and coverup without a shred of evidence that would support his view.

Even sadder, neither editors at Huffington Post, nor major media outlets like CNN, Democracy Now! or others ever fact-checked or even questioned Benjamin's assertions, which were patently untrue. To date, no media outlet that carried Benjamin's story has issued any retraction or substantive correction.

Benjamin Wittes Responds: "Happy to be a government proxy"

In an an arrogant riposte to an earlier posting of mine [at FDL's The Dissenter], Lawfare blogger and member of the Hoover Institute Task Force on National Security and the Law, Benjamin Wittes, proclaimed he is "Happy to be a government proxy."

Wittes' tongue may seem somewhat in cheek, but he really means it. "Government proxy" how? In my earlier article criticizing both Wittes and Adweek columnist Alex Koppelman for their poorly resourced and vituperative articles attacking Scott Horton's investigation of the 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees, published by Harper's Magazine in January 2010. Department of Defense investigations had labeled all three deaths suicides.

Moreover, when both Koppelman and Wittes were cited in a footnote to a Department of Justice brief (PDF) defending numerous government officials against a lawsuit brought by parents of the dead detainees -- Koppelman and Wittes' stories were cited as examples of “numerous articles addressing serious flaws with the HARPER’S MAGAZINE story"-- I noted that the two authors "wittingly or not" had become "government proxies in the matter of the Guantanamo suicides controversy."

Wittes replied, sarcastically, "Wow, I'm Verklempt." He continued:

Turns out that DOJ, in a footnote in a brief before the D.C. Circuit, cited this post of mine from some time back – in which I expressed dismay that Scott Horton and Harpers had received a National Magazine award for a feature article devoted to the spurious suggestion that U.S. service personnel had tortured three Guantanamo detainees to death. The passing citation in the brief prompted this howl of rage from a new blogger over at Firedoglake named Jeff Kaye, who had earlier written a defense of the Harpers article....

Happy to be a government proxy on this one. Robert Loeb and Barbara Herwig, who filed the brief, hereby have my blessing to use any Lawfare post their hearts may desire in defending this suit. I’ll live with myself quite happily, thank you.

Wittes, who saved his strongest complaint for a typo of his name in the post, repeats the lie that Horton's article claimed the three Guantanamo detainees -- Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani -- were "tortured to death" by "U.S. service personnel." In fact, Horton never makes any such claim in the article. It is true that the Al-Zahrani's father is quoted in the article as asserting his son was tortured and killed, but that is very different than Horton coming to such a conclusion. Instead, Horton built a case, based upon contradictions in the government's investigations, eye-witness testimony, independent autopsy, and revelations concerning a CIA (or JSOC?) black site at Guantanamo, that the deaths were "possible homicides."

By claiming Horton implicated "service personnel" in torture or possible homicide, Wittes means to tar Horton with irresponsible attacks against rank-and-file U.S. servicemen and women who have sacrificed much to serve their country. If suspicion falls on anyone, it is on interrogators or agents for the CIA or JSOC. Since writing the story, Horton has been calling, as have the parents, for an independent investigation.

Wittes' portrayal of the DoJ citation of his work is strangely spurious as well. He says that the citation in the brief filed with the D.C. Circuit came from a "post of mine some time back." In fact, the post was dated May 23, 2011, the same day as Koppelman's Adweek screed. The brief, signed by government attorneys in DoJ's Civil Appellate Division, Robert Loeb and Barbara Herwig, as well as by Assistant Attorney General Tony West, was filed on July 13, a mere seven weeks after the Koppelman/Wittes articles. Perhaps we should allow for the subjectivity of time sense and grant Wittes his belief that his article had appeared "some time back" in relation to the government brief. My subjective sense of the affair is that it was quite contemporaneous.

I have very little patience for academic apologists for torture like Wittes. I suppose some, including Wittes himself, might take umbrage at such labels, but an apologist is what he is, no matter how even-handed and reasonable -- a man who supposedly takes no extreme positions -- he presents himself. Take, for instance, his defense of his friend William Haynes' approval of torture techniques at Guantanamo. In an article for The New Republic last year, Wittes defended Bush administration attorneys like Haynes, Jack Goldsmith, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, castigating “the vilification of government lawyers involved in the war on terror.”

Admittedly, Wittes said, Haynes was a friend of his "about whom I do not pretend to be neutral." But rather than forgo comment because of his personal connection (Jack Goldsmith, too, is a personal friend and a professional collaborator, having written articles with Wittes; Goldsmith also is one of two other major contributors, with Wittes, to the blog Lawfare), he defends Haynes's actions, and apologizes for torture.

Wittes in TNR:

Haynes’s long tenure at the Defense Department was a complicated affair. He made mistakes, mistakes I probably would have made too had I been in his shoes. He also behaved very admirably at important junctures.

The memo for which he has been pilloried is also the reason that the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody. [Djamel Ameziane might disagree with that assertion.] Haynes recommended approval of certain modestly coercive techniques—the use of which later spun out of control—but he drew the line at several highly-coercive techniques, waterboarding included. Though they might be legal, he wrote, the military was trained in a tradition of restraint and shouldn’t use them. In other words, he behaved exactly the way the Left often criticizes the CIA for not behaving; even in a crisis setting, he refused to let the criminal law define military interrogation policy. Why is that fact not even part of the conversation about him?

And what were the "certain modestly coercive techniques" Haynes approved? In a November 27, 2002 memo from Haynes to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Haynes approved all "Category I and II" "counter-resistance techniques" that had been requested by Major General Mike Dunleavy, Commander of Task Force 170, Guantanamo. He also approved one of the "Category III" techniques. But as Wittes notes, he did not approve some others, including a version of waterboarding, and the making of death threats.

The actual techniques, derived from SERE torture training conducted by DoD, were described by Dunleavy's staff intelligence director, Lieutenant Commander Jerald Phifer, in a memo that accompanied Dunleavy's request, and which Haynes approved, in large part.

What techniques did Haynes approve? From the Phifer memo, they included all these "Category II" techniques:

(1) The use of stress positions (like standing), for a maximum of four hours.

(2) The use of falsified documents or reports

(3) Use of the isolation facility for up to 30 days. Request must be made to through the OIC [Officer in Charge], Interrogation Section, to the Director, Joint Interrogation Group (JIG). Extensions beyond the initial 30 days must be approved by the Commanding General. For selected detainees, the OIC, Interrogation Section, will approve all contacts with the detainee, to include medical visits of a non-emergent nature.

(4) Interrogating the detainee in an environment other than the standard interrogation booth.

(5) Deprivation of light and auditory stimuli

(6) The detainee may also have a hood placed over his head during transportation and questioning. The hood should not restrict breathing in any way and the detainee should be under direct observation when hooded.

(7) The use of 20 hour interrogations.

(8) Removal of all comfort items (including religious items).

(9) Switching the detainee from hot rations to MREs.

(10) Removal of clothing.

(11) Forced grooming (shaving of facial hair, etc...)

(12) Using detainees individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.

According to Benjamin Wittes, these techniques are "modestly coercive." I wonder if Wittes himself were to be subjected to these, under conditions of indefinite detention, no less, he might not find himself truly "verklempt," or something far worse.

Famously, Donald Rumsfeld scribbled on the bottom of the Haynes memo, "However I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" In Wittes' world, I suppose Haynes is to be congratulated for holding stress positions to only four hours maximum at a time.

But then, I suppose for the Wittes, the intrepid scholar, this post of mine is just another "howl of rage from a new blogger over at Firedoglake." Referencing my notice of Wittes' peculiar sense of time above, I should note I've been writing at Firedoglake since April 2009, a year longer than "Lawfare" has been in business.

One last thing: Mr. Wittes, you cited favorably at your original post on Horton a May 17 blog post by Cully Stimson, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the time of the prisoners’ deaths. In Stimson's post, which you extensively quoted, Stimson claimed, "According to published reports, previously classified documents released by Wikileaks show that the suicides were indeed suicides, and were deliberate acts by the detainees." Could you or Mr. Stimson refer us to these "published reports" or "previously classified documents"? In the name of publishing the truth, and furthering your critique of the Horton article, I can't see why you'd ever refuse.

Cross-posted from The Dissenter/FDL

DoJ Cites Koppelman, Wittes Hit Pieces on Scott Horton's "Guantanamo Suicides"

I'm pleased to cross-post my first article at The Dissenter. I'm excited to be posting at this new Firedoglake blog with Kevin Gosztola. I'll be writing on subjects such as the torture scandal, the politics of psychology, civil liberties, and pretty much the kind of topics I have been covering in the past two years at Firedoglake. My previous FDL postings can be accessed at http://my.firedoglake.com/valtin/.

* * * * *

What one writes in a blog article can have an impact in the "real" world, for good -- or for ill. The following is a cautionary tale, or an outrage, take your pick.

In a couple of recent articles at Truthout and Firedoglake, I critically examined what I termed a "hit piece" by Adweek's Alex Koppleman attacking Scott Horton's January 2010 Harper's article, "The Guantanamo Suicides."

Horton's article questioned the official narrative the Department of Defense offered after their investigations into three Guantanamo detainees purportedly discovered hanging in their cells the night of June 9-10, 2006. The Harper's investigation relied, among other things, on eyewitness testimony from Army guards in the guard towers that night, on independent autopsies conducted on two of the bodies, and on new information about a black site at Guantanamo, dubbed "Camp No."

Koppelman's article was posted on May 23. The article claimed that Horton relied on unreliable stories from the Army guards. Koppelman derided Horton, whose article had just won the National Magazine Award, for "conspiracy building, favoring the evidence that supports the conspiracy view and minimizing the evidence that does not." His article, despite its misrepresentation of the facts, and got a lot of play in the press, including a big boost from Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare, who wrote, "The Harpers story is nothing more than a set of wholly unfounded accusations of murder and conspiracy directed against our men and women in uniform dressed up as investigative journalism.”

Scott Horton Interviews Jeffrey Kaye on Alex Koppelman's Adweek Hit Piece

I had a great time being interviewed on June 3 by the ever-knowledgeable Scott Horton at Antiwar radio. We discussed my critique of the Alex Koppelman story attacking Harper's magazine's award-winning article on "The Guantanamo Suicides." The article was written by Harper's Scott Horton, no relation to the Horton at Antiwar radio.

Jeffrey Kaye, writer for Truthout and Firedoglake, discusses his article “Deconstructing the Campaign to Malign Award-Winning Article on Guantanamo ‘Suicides’” about (the other) Scott Horton’s exposé; the many half-truths and misrepresentations in Alex Koppelman’s Adweek hit piece; how Koppelman’s publication in Adweek sends a message to magazine publishers and advertisers about what is beyond the pale in mainstream media; the Seton Hall study on the botched NCIS investigation of the “suicides;” and the inconclusive autopsy – due to conspicuously missing body parts – done by Swiss pathologist Patrice Mangin (spun by Koppelman as an endorsement of the suicide theory).

Link to listen to mp3 podcast online.

Adweek Article's Big Lie on Autopsy of Guantanamo "Suicide"

A lot of people were apparently very upset when Scott Horton beat out Jane Mayer's New Yorker article on the Koch brothers and Michael Hasting's Rolling Stone article on Gen. McChrystal and won the National Magazine Award for Reporting this year. Horton's January 2010 article in Harper's, "The Guantanamo Suicides," was based on a number of named sources, including the guard in the watch tower mere yards away from the scene of much of the action, and questioned the official story given by the Department of Defense about the purported suicide of three detainees on the evening of June 10, 2006.

Despite articles written that Horton claimed the murder of the detainees, Horton, along with a report by Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy and Research released around the same time, strongly questioned the procedure and results of the DoD investigations and called for a new investigation. Guantanamo authorities had already announced their position within 24 hours of the discovery of the dead bodies: the deaths were supposedly planned suicides, part of an act of "asymmetrical warfare" on the part of the Taliban and Arab prisoners.

After Donald Rumsfeld and ex-DoD flak Cully Stimson wrote articles last month lambasting those who would question the official investigation, former Salon.com WarRoom editor Alex Koppelman produced his own critique in the pages of Adweek. The story, "The National Magazine Award and Guantánamo: A Tall Tale Gets the Prize," posted May 23, got a big reception.

I'm not going to repeat all that was wrong with that story here. I've already produced a comprehenive examination of Koppelman's points in an article posted at Truthout. But I will highlight one crucial area here, and expand upon the Truthout article.

What did Patrice Magnin's Autopsy report really say?

After the death of one of the detainees, Ali Abdullah Ahmed (ISN 693), a 27-year-old Yemeni national, Ahmed's father, not believing his son would trangress Islamic law and kill himself, asked for an independent autopsy after his son's body was returned to the family.

Well, not all his body was returned. The Department of Defense withheld crucial neck organs that would be necessary to determine if the death was due to hanging or other form of asphyxiation. Swiss pathologist Patrice Mangin examined the body. According to Alex Koppelman, the autopsy report (written in French and linked here -- the link originally posted by Horton and Harper's, by the way) "ended with the conclusion that hanging was, in fact, the most likely cause of death."

Koppelman even quotes from the autopsy report: "Yet Horton left out a key conclusion of Mangin’s report. 'The cause of death is most likely the consequence of mechanical asphyxia by violence exercised against the neck as part of a hanging, without being able to formally exclude a different mechanism,' said the report, which was written in French. Mangin reiterated this point in a press conference."

Apparently Koppelman cannot read even English. The quote clearly shows that the death was by "mechanical asphyxia" ("asphyxie mécanique par une violence exercée contra la cou"), and adds that one cannot "formally exclude a different mechanism" ("sans pouvoir exclure formellement un autre mécanisme"). In other words, it may not have been hanging, and without the missing organs, he could not deliver a definitive cause.

But let's hear what Mangin himself told the press in an interview delivered in English, from the Truthout article:

Mangin was quite explicit about his findings in a March 3, 2007 interview in English with Carol Vann at InfoSud. Mangin told Vann, “There was asphyxiation which could be due to suicide but also to other reasons. We have too little information to make any definitive conclusions…. And above all, what was the state of the missing organs? We have written to the American authorities, but so far we have not had any reply.”

So Koppelman misinterpreted or misrepresented the autopsy report. But did he even really read it? Another portion of the report, heretofore unreported, notes (French followed by English):

Il est par ailleurs nécessaire de souligner les limites de l'interprétation médico-légale, résultant d'une part d'un début d'altération postmortem, et d'autre part des remaniements induits par la première autopsie, entraînant l'impossibilité de prélever certains échantillons biologiques en vue d'analyses toxicologiques (notamment sang périphérique et urine), et l'impossibilité d'examiner certains ou de parties d'organes, tel que le larynx avec son squelette.

It is also necessary to emphasize the limits of the medico-legal interpretation, resulting on one hand from postmortem deterioration, and on the other hand from rearrangements induced by the first autopsy, resulting in the inability to collect some biological samples for toxicology testing (including peripheral blood and urine), and the impossibility of examining some or parts of organs such as the larynx with its skeleton.

Another portion of the autopsy report states:

Les lésions odontostomatologiques constatées, en particulier l'exarticulation fraîche de l'incisive inférieure à gauche, en l'absence de contusion des lèvres, nécessite impérativement de pouvoir accéder aux rapport établis par les autorités américaines.

Dentistry lesions are detected, especially fresh exarticulation [loss] of the lower left incisor, in the absence of any bruising of the lips, one imperatively needs to have access to reports by American authorities [wondering, as a later sentence elaborates, if the tooth's loss was due to trauma during attempts to resusciate the body].

In other words, Mangin went to some lengths to spell out problems with any medical or legal conclusions from the autopsy, including the inability to even make toxicological sampling on some portions of the body and its fluids. More than once he reiterates the necessity of more information or items from the U.S. authorities. In the end, the autopsy mainly rules out other forms of death besides mechanical asphyxiation, which could have been caused by hanging, or frankly, from the rags found in each of the mouths and/or throats of the deceased (a fact that was covered up in DoD's report, but can be readily accessed by reading the CITF recorded statements by medical personnel at Guantanamo -- large PDF), or some other cause. One such cause would be strangulation, but lacking the neck's hyoid bone, withheld from the independent autopsy, the crucial forensic determinations could not be made.

This is very different from what Koppelman declared, and which has been picked up and spread all over the Internet like a virulent virus. Still, Koppelman was joining a quite large gaggle of neo-con bloggers and supposedly liberal apostates, like Mark Benjamin.

One of the more purple descriptions of incredulity was made by Benjamin Wittes, who blogged after Harper's and Horton won the magazine award, "The Harpers story is nothing more than a set of wholly unfounded accusations of murder and conspiracy directed against our men and women in uniform dressed up as investigative journalism." He followed this thundering pronouncement with a full reposting of Cully Stimson's own blog post on "Horton's delusional article." (Stimson was former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the time of the prisoners' deaths, a fact that does not cause Wittes to pause a second for possible examination of bias.)

Wittes, Koppelman and a host of others, have chosen to do the bidding of the Department of Defense for reasons of their own. Truth is the victim, and truth-seekers are vilified. That's the way it is in 21st Century Obama's America.

Cross-posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

Deconstructing the Campaign to Malign Award-Winning Article on Guantanamo “Suicides”

Originally posted at Truthout

While not the first article attacking Scott Horton’s controversial Harpers’s article, “The Guantanamo Suicides,” Alex Koppelman’s critique in Adweek on May 23 capped a long campaign by some media figures to impugn the veracity of Horton’s investigation, if not the integrity of both Horton and Harper’s Magazine.

Horton’s article in January 2010 strongly criticized the Department of Defense investigations into the June 10, 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees, bringing forth new eyewitness testimony as to what occurred that terrible evening at the camp, calling into question the official narrative. For their part, Guantanamo authorities immediately labeled these deaths suicides. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commander at Guantanamo, called the deaths a day after they occurred “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

Koppelman’s article appears to be a reaction to the recent presentation of the prestigious National Magazine Award to Horton’s article. The award is given annually by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), who since then have stood by their decision to recognize the Horton article.

The Koppelman article also followed attacks on those critical of the DoD investigation of the “suicides” by Donald Rumsfeld, in a May 12 op-ed at the Washington Post, and a May 17 blogpost by Cully Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs at the time of the prisoners’ deaths, lambasting ASME’s “disgraceful award” to Horton.

In addition, the Adweek article was published only five days after another mysterious purported suicide at the Guantanamo prison camp. Inayatullah was a 37-year-old prisoner found dead either in a recreation yard or in his cell, depending on the news account. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is investigating his death, which if ruled suicide would be the sixth such death at the camp, if one includes the deaths of the three prisoners in 2006.

An unprecedented attack by an advertising industry journal against a magazine industry award-winning story, Koppelman’s article stimulated a cascade of grateful response from conservative commentators, such as The Weekly Standard’s “The Scrapbook, “ Jonathan Last, and Joe Carter (who wrote his own earlier series of articles critiquing Horton’s investigation, blustering that to compare Harper’s Magazine with the National Enquirer “would be an insult to the supermarket tabloid”).

What was surprising was the enthusiasm for Koppelman’s piece from ostensibly more liberal writers, such as John Cole, and Mark Benjamin. In addition, the article was noted and recommended at numerous websites, from Gawker to The Daily Beast.

Benjamin is an interesting, if strange, case. Writing in Time/CNN’s blog, Battleland, Benjamin, himself the author of numerous articles on U.S. torture for Salon.com, wrote, “Alex Koppelman at AdWeek does a thorough job of airing the problems in Horton's piece,“ adding,  “It's worth a read.”

Benjamin never notes in his encomium to Koppelman’s piece that he had a prior relationship with Koppelman at Salon.com, or that he co-authored articles with Koppelman. It never occurs to him to reveal this as any source of potential bias. Perhaps he might have reflected that both Koppelman and he have cited Scott Horton as a reliable commentator on U.S. policies in the past.

As yet, no one has chosen to analyze Koppelman’s article in any depth, though both Harper’s Senior Editor Luke Mitchell, Scott Horton, and legal professor Mark Denbeaux have all replied at various times to previous criticism, a fact Koppelman never cites in his article. Denbeaux was the lead author of a Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy and Research study on the Guantanamo “suicides,” “Death in Camp Delta,” and a follow-up answer to DoD’s reply to the Horton and Seton Hall investigations, published as “DoD Contradicts DoD: An Analysis of the Response to ‘Death in Camp Delta.’”

Koppelman’s supposed exposé of Horton’s article is a mish-mash of poor analysis, half-truths, and misrepresentations of the facts. He relies on the following points, which are reproduced below in the order they appear in the article. In order to examine Koppelman’s evidence, and thereby demonstrate the dishonest methodology employed by Koppelman, the counter-evidence follows each of Koppelman’s arguments.

1)             The story had been “well-shopped” around, and had been considered and rejected by Seymour Hersh, ABC News’ Brian Ross Investigative Unit, CBS 60 Minutes, NBC News’ chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, and an unidentified New York Times reporter.

Nothing is less convincing that this particular argument. There are many reasons why a reporter or news agency may pass on a story. It does not strain credulity too far to say that a story that directly contradicts official Department of Defense investigations may not be acceptable to reporters who value access to Pentagon sources, or who, like Miklaszewski, are involved in national security reportage training that relies to a good extent upon cooperation with Defense Department personnel.

Besides a quote from Miklaszewski, the only other quote from a journalistic source regarding Horton’s article is an anonymous criticism from “one of the reporters who looked into the story.” Why is this source anonymous? Why are they not on the record?

Koppelman studiously ignores in his article news sources and human rights groups that were laudatory of Horton’s article, including Amnesty International and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

2)            Horton’s main sources were perimeter guards, distant from the prisoners.”

Koppelman’s story never says how “distant” the guards were. Army Sergeant Joseph Hickman, the primary source for Horton’s article, was in Tower 1, twenty feet away from Sally Port 1 and mere yards away from the Detention Medical Clinic, the activity areas upon which Hickman reports, and perhaps fifty yards from Alpha block, where the prisoners were ostensibly found.

Rather than having a poor perspective on events, the guards, especially Hickman, had a unique overview of camp activities during the critical events that took place. A map labeling the various camp components was published along with the original Harper’s article. Neither Hickman nor the other Army guards on duty around the camp that night were ever interviewed by military investigators. When Hickman brought new witnesses to the attention of the Department of Justice, DoJ failed to follow-up.

3)            In an interview with Adweek, Colonel Michael Bumgarner, commander of the Joint Detention Group, the guard force component of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, denied he ever made a speech after the suicides telling guards the media would hear the dead detainees had hanged themselves. Horton reported witnesses as saying Bumgarner said “you all know” the detainees killed themselves by swallowing rags, and then choking to death. 

Nothing is stranger, perhaps, than Koppelman’s reliance on DoD assurances, not least that of a primary actor in the controversy, Col. Bumgarner. The JDG commander, who had been at Guantanamo from April 2005, and was due to leave command at the end of June 2006, was stripped of his command only days after the detainees’ deaths, possibly for having told the press that each of the detainees had been found with a ball of cloth in their mouths.

DoD later denied that the dead detainees all had such cloths or “rags” stuffed down their throats, saying, despite evidence from the NCIS investigation to the contrary, that such cloths were present in only one prisoner’s mouth. According to Horton, Bumgarner’s speech to the guards, telling them to stick to the hanging story, was derived via a number of sources. Meanwhile, Koppleman asks us to rely on the word of a man who called the detainees under his control totally untrustworthy, as “nothing short of a damn animal that can’t be trusted.”

Furthermore, reading the detainees’ statements (large PDF) taken by the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantanamo in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the “suicides,” one is struck by the multiple complaints of the “Colonel” for making prison conditions worse during the term of his command.

4)             One of the independent autopsies performed at the request of the families of the deceased men wrote a report that “ended with the conclusion that hanging was, in fact, the most likely cause of death.” Moreover, according to Koppelman, “[Swiss pathologist Patrice] Mangin reiterated this point in a press conference.”

Koppelman’s fudging of the facts regarding Mangin’s autopsy is egregious. In fact, the autopsy report says that the cause of death is mechanical asphyxiation consistent with a hanging, but also “sans pouvoir exclure formellement un autre mécanisme,” that is, unable to formally exclude another mechanism or cause.

The primary reason for the lack of a definitive decision was the decision of U.S. authorities not to provide crucial neck organs -- the larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid cartilage -- whose examination, for instance, could rule out death by hanging versus death by strangulation or other means. The government’s autopsy noted that one detainee had a broken hyoid bone. Such an injury, according to forensic experts, is more consistent with strangulation than hanging, and quite rare in younger persons.

Mangin was quite explicit about his findings in a March 3, 2007 interview in English with Carol Vann at InfoSud. Mangin told Vann, “There was asphyxiation which could be due to suicide but also to other reasons. We have too little information to make any definitive conclusions…. And above all, what was the state of the missing organs? We have written to the American authorities, but so far we have not had any reply.”

Not only did DoD stonewall requests for the missing organs to more than one independent autopsy physician, they gave no answer to questions Mangin had surrounding the odd cuttings of the prisoners’ toenails and fingernails, removing critical evidence such as DNA or other material to be found under the nails, as there often is in murder cases, in particular strangulation (where the victim often claws the attacker to remove their hands or other mechanical choking device).

That Patrice Mangin did not definitively rule the cause of death as suicide by hanging at his press conference, as maintained by Koppelman, also is reported in an Associated Press article on the press conference at the time. Koppelman is totally wrong in his Adweek assertion about Mangin’s findings.

5)            Army Sergeant Joe Hickman’s account of paddy wagons transporting prisoners to a secret black site at Guantanamo, dubbed “Camp No,” is not plausible, and this is backed up by an email from Dwight Sullivan, who’d been chief defense counsel in the Office of Military Commissions, writing at the time to Slate’s Jack Shafer, who also wrote a series of articles last year criticizing the Horton article.

Sullivan wrote about the Camp No issue in an impassioned blogpost recently, calling Horton’s accusations “crazy libel,” “conspiracy theory,” and “Birther/Truther crazy.” Sullivan maintains that the road the paddy wagons took towards Camp No led “to everything on Naval Station Guantanamo other than the detention camps. That road leads to the hospital. That road leads to the commissary. That road leads to the military commission complex. That road leads to a high school. That road leads to housing areas. That road leads to the ferry to the airport. The road leads to a McDonald’s, a coffee shop, and my favorite Guantanamo eating establishment, the Jerk House."

Horton’s own reply to Koppelman appears to answer the charge, explaining that “It’s true, of course, that when you drive out and you get on roads, you could take roads almost anywhere, there were connections that went on, but everyone I spoke with said ‘No, you would not have driven to that part of the base using that road, there were other roads that would have taken you there much more directly.’”

A look at the map of Guantanamo provided with the original Harper’s article shows Camp No to be quite isolated along a road running north of the main prison camp. There is nothing else along that road, and certainly nothing like a McDonalds, or any housing areas. The areas to the east of Camp No, which include some of the areas to which Sullivan alludes, including the camp headquarters, the chapel, and the post office, and other buildings from the camp, are eminently reachable and in much more direct fashion from Camp Delta from a road running west by northwest out of the camp area. (See also this map from The Guantanamo Testimonials Project.) It is difficult to imagine that multiple paddy wagon trips took a long way around to get to other parts of the camp, along a long empty road passing the Camp No area each time. In short, the objections Sullivan raises do not pass the logic test.

Sullivan also quotes in his blog piece a McClatchy news article reporting that former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Zuhoor said the suicides were a plot by Taliban and Arab prisoners at Guantanamo, corroborating charges of “asymmetrical warfare” put forth by camp officials. But, in a lapse of integrity more typical of the charges Sullivan aims at Scott Horton, Sullivan never mentions that the McClatchy reporter cautioned Zuhoor’s story “must be taken with some skepticism” as Zuhoor “admitted lying to the tribunal at Guantanamo about a host of things.” [Updated note: Sullivan is apparently here simply taking an assertion made by Cully Stimson in his blog post and repeating it without checking on its

6)            Hickman may have seen prisoners being transported, but he could not identify them.  Furthermore, the timeline he provides contradicts that of “multiple witnesses” who saw the detainees in their cells that evening.

While Hickman could not identify the prisoners, and never claimed he could, the unusual instance of their nighttime transfer piqued his interest, and took on a more ominous light due to the circumstances that followed.

The “multiple witnesses” argument might carry more weight, if there weren’t significant problems with the witness statements themselves. As Mark Denbeaux and his team at Seton Hall have described it, the “multiple witnesses” testimony is both dubious and unreliable.

For one thing, the Guantanamo Standard Operation Procedure calls for witnesses to a self-harm act to fill out a Form 2823 immediately after a self-harm event (see p. 172, “Emergency Action Plan (EAPs). 32-1. Attempted Actual Self-Harm”). But no sworn statements were ever given until, as Seton Hall wrote, “more than three days after the detainees died and after the official announcement that they hanged themselves."

Moreover, the statements actually given by the six guards on duty in Alpha Block that night were suspected by NCIS of being false, and the guards were made to sign letters to that effect. Yet none of the guards’ statements has ever been released. Of note, no guard or other personnel on duty at Guantanamo that evening was ever disciplined or charged with anything, despite the fact that numerous SOP procedures seem to have been ignored (such as the failure to call an emergency “Code Blue” after the discovery of the bodies).

A number of detainees in Alpha Block were also interviewed. Almost all said they had seen or heard nothing, and at least one blamed the Americans for the deaths of the prisoners.

Koppelman’s article is not a comprehensive summary of all the purported arguments that have been brought to bear against Horton’s reporting, hence Truthout is not here providing a complete refutation of every argument made by every critic that has been made thus far.

But Koppelman’s story gained an inordinate amount of attention, and the credulity with which it was accepted and promoted by a number of people appears to have more to do with animus against Horton’s investigation than anything else. While the Seton Hall reports, which together total over 150 pages, are far more comprehensive in answering the DoD investigation, they have not been the subject of detailed critique by these same critics. But then, many fewer people were likely to have read them than the Harper’s article. In general, except in passing, Koppelman, like others writing negative hit pieces on the Horton article, have ignored the Seton Hall studies, which fully back Scott Horton’s reporting.

Perhaps what the flap over the ASME award demonstrates is that no serious piece of investigative journalism, especially if recognized, that challenges national security narratives will go unattacked. Certainly any piece of journalism can be challenged, and deservedly so, the better to ascertain its credibility. Koppelman’s article fails to stand up to scrutiny. It is an unserious poison pen attack, cavalier with facts, and undetermined to examine what occurred beyond what DoD authorities allege. Those who have jumped on Koppelman’s bandwagon should be ashamed of themselves.